Thursday, January 03, 2008

Eight business technology trends to watch

Three McKinsey consultants have compiled currently fashionable business ideas into a list (registration required); gee, it must be New Year or something.

Nothing very surprising here, but the article does function as a decent annotated bibliography of trendy business books, listed in the "Further Reading" sections.

The list:

Managing relationships


1. Distributing co-creation (Benkler, Chesbrough, Surowiecki, Von Hippel)

2. Using consumers as innovators (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, Tapscott & Williams)

3. Tapping into a world of talent (Florida, Pink)

4. Extracting more value from interactions (Johnson et al., Beardsley et al., Malone)
Managing capital and assets
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation (Hagel, Heinrich, Ross et al.)

6. Unbundling production from delivery
Leveraging information in new ways
7. Putting more science into management (Davenport & Harris, Riedl & Konstan, Thomke, Weinberger)

8. Making businesses from information (Varian and Shapiro)

2 comments:

Jon said...

Well, they're not just any three McKinsey consultants; Kara and Roger (along with Pavel Mucha, now running a company in the Czech Republic, and Paul Todd, now at Google, and several) worked with me on some of the early Ad Astra projects at Microsoft, focusing on game-changing strategies in the online services space, specifically with an eye towards competing with Google.

Kara had tipped me off when this came out, and so I posted about this last month. I thought it was clearly written, and with great references. It seems to me that the categorization was somewhat problematic: stuff like Florida's and Von Hippel's work could fall into several different categories and its placement seems arbitrary. But then again (quoting myself):

"A different way of looking at it though is that artificiality of the distinctions highlights both the linkages between the trends they identify, and the importance of viewing them holistically: the combination of the trends opens up even more interesting possibilities."

JP (Pierre) de Vries said...

Great comment, thanks Jon - provides helpful context and guidance.